Single shot

During World War I, most armies developed attachments for standard service rifles that permitted the launching of “rifle” grenades. However, although range was increased with these devices, accuracy remained poor. An effective answer was a shoulder-fired grenade launcher developed in the 1950s by the Springfield Armory. Resembling a single-shot, break-open, sawed-off shotgun, the M79 lobbed a 40-millimetre, 6-ounce (176-gram) high-explosive fragmentation grenade at a velocity of 250 feet per second to a maximum range of 400 yards. This covered the area between the longest range of hand-thrown grenades (30 to 40 yards) and the middle range of 60-millimetre mortars (300–400 yards).

The M79 employed a “high-low pressure system” developed by Germany during World War II. This involved an aluminum cartridge case with a sealed propellant chamber in front of the primer. The propellant chamber was perforated by a number of partially completed, carefully sized holes leading into a separate expansion chamber within the cartridge case. Upon firing, the high pressures created inside the propellant chamber flowed into the expansion chamber through the previously prepared holes. The resulting moderated gas pressure produced a low impulse that launched the grenade at an adequate velocity and with an acceptable recoil impulse.

M79 grenade launchers were made from 1961 to 1971 and saw a great deal of action in Vietnam. Production was terminated in favour of a launcher attachment for the M16 rifle.

Automatic fire

Grenade-launching machine guns also appeared during the Vietnam War. Instead of the thin-walled projectiles fired by the M79, these shot higher-velocity cartridges. The weapons were first mounted on helicopters but afterward appeared on tripods and armoured vehicles. On these mounts, grenade-launching machine guns such as the U.S. Mark 19, firing 40-millimetre rounds, and the Soviet AGS-17, shooting 30-millimetre projectiles, frequently replaced or supplemented .50-inch heavy machine guns.

Upon their introduction in World War I, tanks posed a very serious problem for foot soldiers. The Germans quickly reacted by introducing the 13-millimetre Tankgewehr (“Antitank Rifle”), a very large-scale single-shot version of the Mauser bolt-action rifle. British designers created the magazine-fed, bolt-action .55-inch Boys antitank rifle in the late 1930s, and the Soviets introduced 14.5-millimetre bolt-action and self-loading antitank rifles during World War II. The increasing thickness of tank armour soon made all of these infantry weapons obsolete, since kinetic-energy weapons that could penetrate tank armour became too heavy and produced too much recoil to be fired from the shoulder.

The search for a shoulder-fired antitank weapon took another turn with the application of a principle discovered in the 1880s by an American inventor, Charles E. Munroe. Munroe found that a hollow cone of explosive material, when detonated with its open end a few inches from metal plate, produced a jet of white-hot gases and molten steel that could penetrate many inches of the best armour. Utilizing the Munroe principle, various “shaped-charge” projectiles were first delivered during World War II by low-velocity, shoulder-held rocket launchers such as the bazooka or by recoilless devices such as the German Panzerfaust (“Tank Fist,” or “Tank Puncher”). Issued in the latter half of the war, the German weapon was a 30-inch-long, 1.75-inch-diameter tube containing a charge of gunpowder. A six-inch-diameter bomb, mounted on a stick with collapsible fins, was inserted into the front end, and the weapon, held over the shoulder or under the arm, was fired by a simple firing pin and percussion cap on the outside of the tube. The propellant gases blew a cap off of the rear of the tube, in effect canceling the recoil forces generated by the launching of the bomb, which could be lobbed to ranges of 30 to 100 yards. Its powerful shaped charge of RDX and TNT could penetrate any tank armour.

Following World War II, the Soviet military perfected the Panzerfaust-type recoilless launch mechanism in their Ruchnoy Protivotankovy Granatomet 2 (RPG-2), a “Light Antitank Grenade Launcher” featuring a reusable launcher that lobbed an 82-millimetre shaped-charge warhead more than 150 yards. After 1962, with their RPG-7, they combined recoilless launch with a rocket sustainer to deliver a five-pound warhead to targets beyond 500 yards. The Soviet RPGs became powerful weapons in the hands of guerrillas and irregular fighters in conflict against more conventionally armed and heavily armoured forces. As such, they were used by the Viet Cong to destroy U.S. armoured vehicles in Vietnam and by militiamen in the protracted conflicts of the Middle East.

Other countries also developed small, shoulder-held recoilless launchers firing shaped-charge warheads. Some of them, such as the American AT4, came preloaded and were designed to be discarded after firing.

Click anywhere inside the article to add text or insert superscripts, subscripts, and special characters.
You can also highlight a section and use the tools in this bar to modify existing content:

Add links to related Britannica articles!
You can double-click any word or highlight a word or phrase in the text below and then select an article from the search box.
Or, simply highlight a word or phrase in the article, then enter the article name or term you'd like to link to in the search box below, and select from the list of results.

Note: we do not allow links to external resources in editor.
Please click the Web sites link for this article to add citations for
external Web sites.